Healthy Eating goals for 2016 and beyond
The New Year is here with us and we all expect the very best of the year. Good wishes keep flooding our mobile phones via the various social media platforms we are exposed to. Amidst all these wishes, I also wish you a year full of health and wellness.
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I want you to know that the choices you make come 2016 about what foods you eat or avoid will go a long way to determine how healthy, well or sick you will be several years to come. Thus it becomes very important for us to consider making healthier food choices. But the situation is not so with most people.
It is very common to hear a patient defer their appointment to see a health care provider for reasons such as funerals, family celebrations and marriage ceremonies.
Often their role in such activities is so insignificant that those ceremonies can actually go on minus their presence, but they surely must be there to make issues complete and as it were fulfill all righteousness. This to them is more important than acting at the same time to safeguard their own health.
It is with great awe that I watch patients who default on their treatment and only return to me some time later to give me some of the afore mentioned as their reasons for not being able to come for dietetic reviews.
It baffles my mind since I stand at a place where my view of the possible outcome of their condition is really not a thing to joke with. It is bad to ignore your own health just to suffer bad consequences after some years.
Prevention is better than cure; a very true old saying. We have to act to prevent diseases rather than wait only to rush to cure them when they appear.
We all can see that the spread of the Ebola virus in affected countries has stopped; with Guinea being declared Ebola free by the World Health Organisations (WHO) and the scare of it coming to Ghana has also reduced drastically; this is simply because we all are taking precaution.
Though not much is being said about it nowadays, you are kindly being reminded to continue maintaining the highest level of good hygiene.
When you sleep under a treated mosquito net, you will not get malaria. So why expose your body to the mosquitoes and suffer the consequences.
Healthy eating is a must if we can prevent diabetes, hypertension, prostate cancer, high blood cholesterol, strokes, among others.
Some say after all, we have been eating for so many years and are still alive, many also realising that they can hardly do anything about their current eating habits whimsically resort to the popular saying "all-die-be-die".
My brothers and sisters, "all-die-no-be-die" oooo. Visit the mortuary and see.
Prevention is a possibility
Elsewhere, there is growing concern about the dangers that current eating habits pose to the very survival of the active workforce of nations.
There is much more commitment as well from the part of governments and civil society to save the lives of the many unsuspecting youth and young people who risk falling prey to non-communicable diseases due to bad eating habits, lack of exercise and lack of knowledge on preventive health practices.
For those in our part of the world, the burden of disease becomes double since people will be hungry due to lack of economic empowerment and at the same time they will be sick due to the kind of foods they eat.
Stay blessed and keep doing your best to eat well for health and wellness.
The writer is a dietician and author of “Diet, Health & Wellness book”.
Email: [email protected], Tel: 0244090262.
Book available at Kingdom Books and Stationery book shops.